Visitors to Art Basel in June may have choked on their bratwurst when they clocked Lucian Freud’s eye-watering painting of Leigh Bowery’s genitals. Parts of Leigh Bowery (1992), which White Cube brought to the fair, depicts one of the UK artist’s favourite subjects (Freud spotted the corpulent club promoter performing in the window of London’s Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988, and Bowery became Freud’s model for two years). But the painting has always made waves. In 1993, the organisers of a Freud exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery removed the work before the show travelled to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, because it was considered too naughty for audiences in the US.
